To create this list we have been looking at dozens of data visualization, image mapping and picture mosaic solutions plus piles of descriptions. To make the list most useful we came up with the following criteria for the tools:

Should be online and actively maintained by the site owner

Should be interactive

Should use photos / images for visualization

Should use online data

We’ve seen many great projects and fantastic work that has been done but is not being updated anymore. Also there are quite a few stand-alone solutions that require to install software packages on your computer, do some development or create your own databases. Others just exist as screen shots.

All those we have not included but we are happy to point you to them.

While we were working on the list it became clear that there are some excellent projects that provide similar solutions so we clustered the results as following:

Web Search including Social Networks

Art and Beautiful

Flickr

Amazon

News

Virtual Worlds and Maps

We tried out all the sites ourselves. In our opinion there is a lot of potential for new solutions in some of these fields and they are evolving quickly.

screenshots and links after the jump

We will introduce each of the services with a short description only because we believe its much better to find out more on interactive solutions when you try them out yourself. Have a go.

Web Search including Social Networks

It is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other and updated every second.

The most popular sites are in the center of the swarm and traffic is shown with lines. Whenever a line appears someone has moved from one site to the other. Swarm also allows users to chat about the web sites and links. A Firefox extension is used to capture data, but you can watch by just going to their web site.

From October 10 until November 8 this year users from all over the world have been contributing photos, documents, videos, audio and drawings to this electronic anthropology project. All the data that has been collected will now be preserved and might become part of the web history one day. Users that contributed to the Time Capsule also participate in the selection of seven global charitable organizations to which Yahoo! has then donated USD100,000.

You can view, read, or hear all the material contributed from around the world with the outstanding user interface created by Jonathan Harris

We could have also included this application in the “Art and Beautiful” section but we thought it’s really a great example for a social network.

Art and Beautiful

He describes the project as an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time.

…Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time…

Each hour a photo mosaic is created from 100 different frames. When you click on the images the stories behind them are being displayed.

The data 10×10 produces (including history) can also be directly accessed online and developers can include it within in their own non-commercial projects. The project has also inspired the Yahoo! Netrospective.

There are many more News visualizations with images – many of them similar to “A day in the life / world/ etc”. The 10×10 project would actually also belong to this group but we already included it in another group earlier in this article.

Virtual Worlds and Maps

It creates an interactive 3D world by projecting local images over a map. With images linked to your current position you can have a look around in a photo realistic world

Expect to see more of these services soon. We have spotted vans going around capturing pictures in Europe and the US since more then 6 years.

Mappr

If you have geo-coded your photos on Flickr or just want to look at photos from others Mappr is the place to go to.

Mappr is an application that has been created by Stamen the people who also created Digg Swarms (not to be mixed up with the Swarm application mentioned earlier).

Mappr overlays a map of the USA with images from Flickr photo collections / tags or individual users. You can zoom in to show more details of the images. This application is around since quite some time but still one of the best we have seen.

Google is now / will soon also providing a solution to geo tag your images with Picasa. We are not completely sure where this is but to get an overview have a look at the Ogle Earth or the article at Rakaz on this topic.

We tried to find whatever is working out there but we might have overlooked some. Please leave a comment if you think we should include a web site on this list.

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